Could Re-Wilding Avert the 6th Great Extinction? [Slide Show]

Share

DUNG BEETLE In Tembe Elephant Park—a key region of the Lubombo Transfrontier Conservation Area, a transboundary project in South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique—dung beetles have the right-of-way. With over 100 species of the iridescent insects in this unique sand forest region, tourist vehicles are required to veer around piles of elephant dung to avoid harming them while they look for some of the other wildlife protected here: the rare Livingstone's suni antelope, a tiny, quivering, rabbit-size deer; the larger but still rare nyala antelope; both the black and white rhino; and the last indigenous southern African elephant population, thought to be the largest on the continent. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

ORPHAN ELEPHANTS Watched over carefully by their adoptive human parents, orphaned elephants play, drink and bathe at The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an elephant orphanage just outside the Nairobi National Park, named for a famous Kenyan parks official and run by his widow, Dame Daphne Sheldrick. The first institution to learn how to foster and raise infant elephants successfully, the project assigns each tiny pachyderm its own human guardian, creating valuable jobs while increasing our understanding of this unique and fragile species. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

CARMINE BEE-EATERS Southern carmine bee-eaters (Merops nubicoides) perch next to a cliff wall housing hundreds of their burrows in Botswana's Okavango Delta. The Delta is a birder's paradise and popular with sports fishermen, who yearn to land a freshwater trophy, the tiger fish (Hydrocynus vittatus)—the carnivorous "water dog". That fish, however, and much else in the delta is threatened by extraction of water, pollution and the destruction of the Nile crocodile population, the one predator that can hold burgeoning numbers of catfish in check. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

STICK INSECT Botswana offers some of the finest high-end safaris in Africa, but a burgeoning population of elephants are hemmed in by veterinary barriers and border fences. To restore their migratory pathways and protect the incomparable beauty of the Okavango Delta, a wetland that never reaches the sea, conservation organizations are launching the Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, designed to increase ecotourism and bring needed jobs to the people of the region. In the Tsodilo Hills—a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site in the Kalahari Desert just outside the Delta that preserves rock paintings dating back thousands of years—the author holds a modern-day resident, Bactrododema tiaratum, the giant stick insect. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

Advertisement

ONE-HORNED RHINO A greater one-horned rhino (Rhinoceros unicornis) emerges from the dense grassland of Nepal's Chitwan National Park onto a jeep track. This individual has lost its horn, which consists of compressed hair fibers and presents a powerful incentive to poachers who can sell it for export to China for thousands of dollars a kilogram: In Asian traditional medicine the rhino horn is believed to be an effective treatment for fever. The horn grows back eventually, but law-enforcement efforts funded by conservation groups remain critical to the survival of the species. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

ASIAN ELEPHANT Outside Tiger Tops Tented Camp, a tourist facility within Chitwan National Park in Nepal, elephant handlers prepare to load a howdah, or platform, onto a domesticated female Asian elephant, the only safe transportation for tourists bent on penetrating the dense grasslands of the park to see its most famous denizens: the Bengal tiger and the greater one-horned rhinoceros. Persecuted by poachers, the rhino in particular represents a danger to people on foot, but the elephant's odor masks the despised human scent, allowing visitors to gaze at this fascinating, highly-endangered species. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

HUNGRY BEAR Romania's Carpathian Mountains form one of the largest core wilderness areas in Europe, home to 5,000 bears, 3,000 wolves and 2,000 lynx, which were protected for decades during the brutal reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, an enthusiastic bear hunter who reserved hunting rights for himself and his cronies. Since the fall of his regime, Romania's wildlife has coexisted—more or less peacefully—alongside the country's 4.5 million sheep and 1.5 million cattle. Biologists want to put more of the Carpathians under official protection while encouraging rural farmers to hew to ancient farming and sheepherding methods, which yield cheese and produce that can be tailored for Europe's organic markets, yet preserve native biodiversity. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

OCELOT Mariana Furtado, a Brazilian veterinarian, changes the battery in a radio collar worn by one of Emas National Park's ocelots. One of the last surviving pieces of a once-mighty ecosystem, the Brazilian Cerrado, Emas offers biologists the opportunity to study the little-known species of this habitat while they work to restore wildlife corridors between the grasslands and the enormous Pantanal wetland to the west. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

Advertisement

MANED WOLF A maned wolf, one of the unique suite of fauna protected in Brazil's Emas National Park, a scrap of the continent's once-mighty Cerrado (grassland) ecosystem, bolts from a live trap. The radio collar around his neck will ensure that researchers can keep tabs on his movement patterns. Biologist Leandro Silveira and his wife, the veterinarian Anah Tereza de Almeida Jácomo, have been compiling basic field data on the wolves as well as on Emas's jaguars, mountain lions, giant armadillos and giant anteaters since 1994. They have found that the maned wolf—Chrysocyon brachyurus, not a true wolf but an ancient relative of the dog—will hunt in agricultural fields, whereas the jaguars of Emas shun cultivated land, keeping to densely forested riparian corridors. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

GREVY'S ZEBRA Over the past few decades, the Grevy's zebra, an important herbivore that ranges throughout the Horn of Africa's savannas, has suffered severe habitat loss and become critically endangered, its numbers dropping from 15,000 to under 3,000. To safeguard the species while working on projects to expand its habitat, the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy--a renowned sanctuary for rhino and other endangered wildlife in Kenya--hosts scientists who conduct field counts, vegetation transects and behavioral studies of this zebra's unique social behavior: While grazing, females corral foals in "kindergartens," groups of infants left in control of a minder. The behavior encourages rapid growth of the young, who husband their energy while putting on weight; it also, however, exposes them to predation. Here a Grevy's female and foal keep a wary eye out for danger. Courtesy of Caroline Fraser

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers.